Image: Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
In August 2026, kurimanzutto opened ‘LIFE IS A KILLER’, the first solo exhibition in Mexico City dedicated to John Giorno. The exhibition brings together visual art, sound, film and performance.
A From the Archive feature dated October 2026 revisits Giorno’s question of how far poetry could go, describing his continual search to extend its boundaries, expand its forms and bring it into circulation among audiences who might never have sought it out. Giorno imagined poetry beyond the printed page: encountered at the other end of a telephone line, reverberating through a room or presented as words painted on a wall.
The feature traces his experiments with Dial-A-Poem, sound and light installations, records, publications, Poem Paintings, Buddhist practice, political activism and collaborations with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe.
His first book, ‘Poems’ (1967), was edited by Peter Schjeldahl and featured a cover by Robert Rauschenberg. For the 1980 album ‘Sugar, Alcohol and Meat’, Giorno commissioned Robert Mapplethorpe to photograph him alongside William S. Burroughs and John Ashbery for the album cover.
Born in New York City in 1936, Giorno grew up between Brooklyn and Roslyn Heights in an Italian American family; in 1951, at fourteen, he wrote his first poem for a school assignment, an experience that led him to recognize himself as a poet.
